There are multiple use cases where a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software product can be used, some examples:
- Customer in a Bank
- Customer in a Hotel
- Student as a Customer in an educational institution
- Customer is a Health Care industry
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 is a web based CRM and covers the following functional areas at its core:
- Sales
- Leads
- Opportunities
- Communication Tracking
- Product Databases
- Workflows
- Marketing
- Planning and Budgeting
- Marketing Lists
- Campaigns
- Tracking and Reporting
- Service
- Case Recording
- Contract Management
- Services and Resource Management
- Appointment Scheduling
- Knowledge Base
These functional areas are very easily seen when you hover over the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Logo as shown.
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When you click on Sales, you see the Sales functions as shown:
![sales page]()
When you click on Marketing, you see the Sales functions as shown:
When you click on Service, you see the Sales functions as shown:
Many more functional links are present when you go into the details of each of the main areas. Apart from Web, mobile and tablet clients, Microsoft CRM 2015 is also seamlessly integrated into Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft CRM 2015 can be deployed on premise as well as on the cloud.
There is a quick "Create" link on the main page, that is helpful to create a new instance of any of the preceding mentioned entities.
![service page]()
"Entity" is the basic in Microsoft CRM as "Table" is a basic in a database. Entity is a table with fields (attributes) that holds business records. Entities can be system entities, business entities, custom entities, organization entities and so on. By default, there are 313 rows in the EntityIds table of an organization CRM database. There are 87 rows in the TargetEntityName table by default. Part of this table is as shown.
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In subsequent articles, we will go into more details of Entities, their types, relationships and so on as well as into details of Microsoft CRM 2015 functionalities.